fEIOOIOOOONS 


WITH DRAWINGS BY 
GEORGE BARBIER 


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THE ROMANCE OF PERFUME — : 


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AY” RICHARD Le GALLIENNE “Up 


DRAWINGS 
By’ 


GEORGE 
BARBIER 


PUBLISHED BY 
RICHARD HUDNUT 
NEw YORK-PARIS 
1928 


THE ROMANCE OF PERFUME 


nae 2 Jp ©» HE old magicians laid great stress on the wonder- 
working power of certain words. Many old charms and spells 
consisted entirely of words, spoken correétly under the right con- 
ditions, or written on parchment and worn round the neck in little 
silken bags. Our old acquaintance from the Arabian Nights, Adra- 
cadabra, was such a word. Spirits rose from the vasty deep, and the 
bronze doors of buried treasure-chambers sprang open, with daz- 
zling disclosure, at its utterance. This power of words is no mere 
fable. There are words in common use of a like potency. The power 
of orators lies in their employment. But here we are concerned 
only with a word which cannot be overmatched by any in the dic- 
tionary for its concentrated power upon the mind, the word— 
perfume. Its mere mention carries us over the length and breadth 
of Time. To follow its associations is to survey all human history, 
and to trace its adventures would be to write the Story of civiliza- 
tion. Perhaps there are but two other words, the words—Love and 


pals 44 
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War, that similarly concentrate, as in an essence, the drama of 
man’s life upon the earth, and even they do not more completely 
concentrate and evoke its romance and mystery than the word— 
perfume. To begin with, the thing itself is so mysterious in its 
origin and its operation. Music is even less Strange, more capable 
of explanation, for instance, than musk. That the rubbing of horse- 
hair over catgut on a violin should stir within us thoughts beyond 
the reaches of our soul, is marvellous indeed, but the magic hidden 
in a dried secretion of the male musk deer from the mountain 
ranges of Atlas and the Himalayas is certainly no less marvellous. 
The power of musk to diffuse itself over large spaces and to endure 
through long lapses of time, without any apparent diminution of 
itself, as a physical fact alone, appeals to the imagination. 3 

‘‘A few centigrams of musk placed on a sensitive scale,” says a 
scientific writer, “can for years fill a large hall with their char- 
acteristic odour, without showing an appreciable loss in weight.” 

Perfume would seem to be one of the elements, one of the orig- 
inal secrets of the universe. How it gets into flowers, and certain 
uncouth creatures, as for instance, ambergris in the whale, or civet 
in the civet-cat of Abyssinia, or musk once more in the Florida 
alligator, is a hidden process of the divine chemistry, and why it 
affects us as it does no philosopher has yet explained. Literally it 
belongs to those invisible powers whose influence is incalculable, 
and as yet unknowable. 

Leaving aside as insoluble its origin and operation, and accept- 
ing it as a beautiful mystery, let us surrender ourselves to the incan- 
tation of the mere word—perfume—for it is in itself a veritable 
attar of all the romantic experience of humanity. In it as in a little 

aw 6 i 


glass vessel charged with the distilled essence of the souls of the 
moonlit roses of a garden in Shiraz, wherein, too, the songs of the 
Shiraz nightingales have become mysteriously blended, are locked 
all the perfumed memories of Time. A mere breath of it Stealing 
through the brain will make pictures for us of all the glory and 
pathos of the world, carrying us beyond the confines of recorded 
history, into the august mornings of the early gods, about whose 
ruined shrines the old incense Still indestructibly hovers, and re- 
creating for us the magnificence of superhuman kings whose sar- 
cophagi Still exhale frankincense, galbanum and myrrh. Egypt 
and Greece and Rome come back re-created by a mere perfumed 
breath in our nostrils, and lands with magic names, Arabia, 
Persia, and far Cathay, are spread before us vividly as in a dream. 


A Caravan from China comes, 
For miles it sweetens all the air 

With fragrant silks and Stealing gums, 
Attar and myrrh— 

A caravan from China comes. 

O merchant, tell me what you bring, 
With music sweet of camel bells, 

How long have you been travelling 
With these sweet smells? 

O merchant, tell me what you bring. 


Time has been travelling with these sweet smells from the begin- 
ning; and, though its history may be written in blood and tears, it 
is written, too, and perhaps more completely, in perfume. The Story 


ny WA 
Ww 7 & 


of man, I repeat, is the Story of perfume, for every Step he has 
taken since chaos to this present hour has been accompanied by 
sweet odours. In sweet odours his multitudinous memories are 
wrapped. We have but to breathe them to watch the whole ro- 
mantic past rebuilding about us in a phantasmagoria of pa 


C5 fur soul of a man in love is full of perfumes and sweet 
oJ odours,” says Plutarch, and the mysterious connection be- 
tween perfume and the soul seems to have been one of the earliest 
intuitions of man groping dimly after an understanding of that 
Strange side of him which eludes the eye and the ear, and after 
which the hands reach in vain: that “little soul,” that divine — 
“breath,” so vague, so tender and caressing, “vagula, blandula,” : : 
which the Emperor Hadrian expressed, imprisoned like a butterfly, i | 
in a tiny cage of fluttering words. As perfume seems to be the soul ia 
of the flower, so the spirit in man has seemed in all ages to be the ae om 
evasive immortal essence of his mortal body. Some philosophers, 
indeed, have placed the soul in the olfactory nerve, and the sense 
of smell has always been recognized as the most ethereal of the 
senses. All that is sacred, pure, and innocent in man, all that sug- 
gests his Starry origin and destiny, seems in some way to be most 
poignantly hinted at in perfume. Not merely fancifully and sym- 
bolically, but a€tually. The deeds of a good man are said to “smell 


sweet and blossom in the dust,” and the innocence of children, the 
pure thoughts of youth, the holiness of saintly men and women, 
are known to give a sensible fragrance to their very bodies. “The 
odour of sanctity” is no mere phrase. It has been over and over 
again attested as a fact. On the other hand, evil is suggested i 
Mw 8 ih i 


foul odours, as, say, in the case of beautiful fungi, which, however 
beautiful to look upon, offend and even make us afraid as at the 
presence of something dark and unsané¢tified. The gods and god- 
desses of all religions are represented as spreading about them a 
cloud of sweet perfume, an effluence from the central loveliness of 
their divinity. ““The lotus,” says an old Arabian proverb, “‘has its 
root in the mud of the Nile, and its perfume at the throne of God.” 

The Elysian Fields, which was the Greek’s idea of Heaven, 
were made out of perfume. In the midst of them stood a golden 
city with ramparts of emerald and gates of cinnamon. About the 
walls flowed a river of perfumes, one hundred cubits in width, and 
deep enough to swim in, from which rose an odorous mist, which 
enveloped the whole place and shed a refreshing and fragrant dew. 
In this city, too, there were three-hundred and sixty-five fountains 
of honey and five hundred of the sweetest essences. 

Similarly the ground of Mahomet’s Paradise is made of musk, 
and the houris that dwell there are made of musk from head to 
feet; also in the building of certain famous mosques large quanti- 
ties of musk were mingled with the mortar. 

Perfume thus being a divine attribute, it is natural that the 
priests of the earliest religions should be the first perfumers. The 
Egyptian priests practiced the manufacture of perfumes as one of 
their ecclesiastical mysteries, using them in the worship of the gods 
and in the funeral ceremonies of great kings. It is on record that 
in a religious procession in the reign of one of the Ptolemies, one 
hundred and twenty children marched, bearing incense, myrrh 
and saffron in golden basins, followed by numerous camels laden 
with three hundred pounds of frankincense, crocus, cassia, cinna- 


WO M 


mon and orris. It was from their bondage in Egypt that, among 
other civilizing influences, the Jews derived their knowledge and 
sacred regard for perfumes. Readers of the Bible will recall that 
among the first of the Divine commands given to Moses were 
directions as to the erecting of an altar of incense, and the com- 
pounding of the holy oil and perfume, for use alike in the anoint- 
ing of the altar, the tabernacle, the sacred vessels, and the heads of 
kings. Very specific were the Divine directions for the compound- 
ing of this holy oil, as may be read in the Book of Exodus: ““Take 
unto thee sweet spices, Stacte, and onycha, and galbanum; these 
sweet spices with pure frankincense; of each shall be a like weight: 
and thou shalt make it a perfume, a confection after the art of the 
apothecary, tempered together pure and holy.” In Babylon, Assyria 
and Persia, there was the same sacred use of perfume, and even the 
druidesses of ancient Britain crowned their brows with verbena. 
Incense and prayer were accounted as one, as they mounted to- 
gether into the ethereal spaces and pleaded with perfume before 
the thrones of the immortal gods. Kama, the Hindoo god of love, 
employed perfumes as weapons, and so generally associated with 
sacred uses was perfume in antiquity that Moses decreed very severe 
penalties against those who used the holy oil and incense for private 
purposes: ““Whosoever shall make like unto that, to smell thereto, 
shall even be cut off from his people.” 

Perfume has always signified something fine, mySterious, aristo- 
cratic in human life. Beginning as the attribute of gods and god- 
desses, it became the peculiar treasure of kings and princes and all 
noble persons, and it may well be that its immemorial association 
with beautiful women is related to that divinity which Plato and 

WY ITO he 


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«Ancient Greece 


other great philosophers have always maintained as residing in 
beautiful forms. Gods, kings, nobles and beautiful women: with 
these perfume is associated as by divine, aristocratic right. 


BP HARLES LAMB speaks of certain names that “bring a 
perfume in the mention.” Arabia is such a name, and par- 
ticularly when we speak of it in Roman fashion, as “Arabia Felix”’ 
—“Araby the Blest’’—it seems, like those houris of Mahommed’s 
Paradise, to be made entirely of musk. Indeed, when we speak of 
“the East” generally, the first enveloping thought in our minds is 
that of piled up roseate clouds of perfume, a rolling curtain of 
sweet odours, through which come gleams of far-away enchanted 
lands of mystery and romance, mosques and palms and rose- 
gardens filled with moonlight and nightingales. As when we speak 
of Greece we think first of marble, to say “The East” is to think— 
perfume; the Perfumed East. It Stirs our imagination just as a 
flower Stirs it. Above all its other associations, it is a sweet smell in 
the mind. And the reason, of course, is that the East was the dis- 
coverer of perfume. Its peoples were the first lovers and artists of 
perfume, and its first purveyors to the rest of the world. In the past, 
as Still in a measure to-day, its beautiful business was perfume, and 
its merchants, from China, Hindustan and Persia, from Babylon 
and Assyria, moved aromatically across the Arabian desert in cara- 
vans laden with balms and spices for the altars of Egypt, and the 
palaces of Greece and Rome. Babylon was the great clearing house 
of perfume, gathering into its warehouses the whole perfume har- 
vest of the East, to be distributed by the ubiquitous Phoenician 
trader through Tyre and Sidon, and Sheba in Arabia Felix, till 
WW II i 


even such savage borders of the earth as Gaul and Britain were 
touched with the civilizing breath. Among the mercantile activi- 
ties of Tyre recorded in the Book of Ezekiel, the trade in balm, 
“with chief of all spices,”—through “the merchants of Sheba” — 
finds particular mention. In the ruins of Susa and Nippur perfume 
bottles of glass and alabaster, ointment boxes of porcelain and chal- 
cedony are unearthed by the archaeologist to this day. The pomp 
of Oriental kings expressed itself in nothing so magnificently as 
in perfume. 

“You are a happy man, O king: you smell in a most costly man- 
ner,” said one of his poor subjects to Antiochus, King of Syria, a 
remark which so pleased the monarch that he ordered a large ewer 
of the royal unguent to be poured over the head of his humble, 
unperfumed admirer. | 

This same King Antiochus once held some games at Daphne, 
the description of which gives picturesque evidence of the lavish 
use of perfumes in the ancient world. “In one of the processions,’ 
we read, “there were two hundred women sprinkling every one 
with perfumes out of golden water-pots. In another, marched boys 
in purple tunics, bearing frankincense, and myrrh, and saffron, on 
golden dishes, and after them came two incense-burners made of 
ivy-wood covered with gold, six cubits in height, and a large square 
golden altar in the middle of them. Every one who entered the 
gymnasium was anointed with some perfume contained in gold 
dishes. There were fifteen of these dishes, each holding different 
scents, such as saffron, cinnamon, spikenard, fenugreek, amarancus 
and lilies. Thousands of guests were invited, and after having richly 
feasted were sent away with crowns of myrrh and frankincense.” 

M12 ie 


Sardanaphalus is said to have committed suicide by causing him- 
self to be burnt alive on a pyre of fragrant woods, and when Darius 
was vanquished by Alexander, among the spoils was found a casket 
filled with precious perfumes, which the young conqueror at first 
affected to despise, having in mind, perhaps, his old tutor Leonidas, 
who had reproached him with a waste of incense in his sacrifices. 
“It would be time for him so to worship,” the philosopher had said, 
“when he had conquered the countries that produced the frank- 
incense,” a remark which Alexander recalled when he had con- 
quered Arabia, and, as an ironical reminder, sent his old tutor a 
cargo of frankincense and myrrh. And later on, as Alexander con- 
tinued his Asiatic conquests, he seems in turn to have been con- 
quered by perfume, and to have become accustomed to his floors 
being sprinkled with perfume, and to having aromatic resins and 
myrrh constantly burned in his presence. 


HE Greek poets and dramatists abound in references to per- 
fumes, and the names of several famous Greek perfumers 
have thus come down to us. The scent “megallium” embalmed the 


name of its inventor “old Megallus,” and a fashionable perfumer 
of Athens, Peron, still lives for us in an old play: 


“EL Left the man in Peron’s shop just now 
Dealing for ointment; when he has agreed, 


He'll bring you cinnamon and spikenard essence.” 


Wl 13 ihe 


And the toilet of a Greek dandy is thus described: 


eS E really bathes 
In alarge gilded tub, and Steeps his feet 
And legs in rich Egyptian unguents; 
His jaws and breasts he rubs with thick palm oil 
And both his arms with extract sweet of mint; 
His eyebrows and his hair with marjoram, 
His knees and neck with essence of ground thyme.” 


Perfumed baths for guests are mentioned by Homer, and in the 
later days of Greek luxury perfumes were scarcely less important 
than the food at all delicate banquets. They were used not merely 
for the purification of the hands, but were presented to the guests 
for their pleasure in gold and alabaster bottles, and sweet odours 
were showered down upon them, as they sat, by many fanciful de- 
vices. Doves with wings saturated with perfume would circle above 
their heads as they ate, raining down upon them a fragrant irides- 
cent mist. Perfume was also mingled with the wine, “‘myrrhine, ” 
a preparation of myrrh, being fashionable for this purpose, as well 
as honey and sweet-smelling flowers. 

The Romans followed the Greeks in the use of perfumes as they 
followed them in all the civilized arts and elegancies. Perfume 
naturally played a great part in their elaborate baths, one room of 
which was called the “unétuarium,” wherein were ranged large 


jars of ointments and essences for the use of the bathers. Among 


the simpler of these were unguents such as “rhodium” made from 
8 

roses, “‘melinum”’ from quince-blossoms, “‘metopium” from bitter 

NI4 Ne 


almonds, “‘narcissinum”’ from the narcissus, but there were a num- 
ber of others more elaborate; one in particular favoured by the 
more wealthy sybarites having been specially invented for the king 
of the Parthians. This consisted of twenty-seven ingredients, and 
cost four hundred “denarii,” something like a hundred dollars, a 
pound. Roman men of fashion, following their Greek models, 
made use of a different perfume for each part of their person, and 
for each of their garments. So far did the rage for perfume go in 
Rome that horses and dogs were rubbed with scented ointments. 
Military flags were also perfumed, and while the blood of gladi- 
ators and wild beasts was Staining the sands of the amphitheatre, 
odorous dews were falling upon the spectators from the “velar- 
ium,” the awning that formed the roof. Saffron was particularly 
in use for this purpose. 

As in Greece, too, perfume was lavishly used at Roman feasts, 
and Catullus, in inviting his friend Fabullus to dinner, after first 
telling him that he must bring the materials of the dinner himself, 
“for the purse of your Catullus is full of cobwebs,” adds that he, 
on his side, will look after the perfumes. “On the other hand,” he 
says, “you shall have from me love’s very essence, or what. 1s 
sweeter or more delicious than love, if sweeter there be; for I will 
give you some perfume which the Venuses and Loves gave to my 
lady; and when you snuff its fragrance, you will pray the gods to 
make you, Fabullus, nothing but nose.” 

Again, as in Greece, the universal passion for perfume in Rome 
resulted in making the shops of the perfumers fashionable rendez- 
vous, and the “‘unguentarii,” as they were called, became an hon- 
oured and thriving class. Whole quarters of some cities were given 

MW I5 i 


up to them and their aromatic merchandise. Rome had its “vicus 
thuraricus,”’ Capua had its Street of the Perfumers, called Seplasia, 
and the sophisticated city of Alexandria had a veritable rose-garden 
of marts and booths, where sweet-smelling ladies, and their gal- 
lants, no less redolent of the mysterious distillations of the East, 
rustled and glittered in the gay African sunshine. Those “unguen- 
tarii” were the high-priests of fashion and pleasure, and many of 
them were learned chemists, as well as artists, in whose laboratories 
ebony slaves worked at their fragrant employ, sternly watched, and 
Stripped, and examined at the end of the day—just as diamond- 
workers Still are in South Africa—lest they should have Stolen 
some of the costly un¢ctions for themselves. 

Perhaps nothing is more significant about perfume than its power 
of investing with charm and distinCtion everything with which it 
is associated, everything upon which it has left its lingering touch— 
even trade. To trade in perfumes is to belong to romance. Perhaps 
there is nothing that men have sold that so dignifies the merchant. 
Beautiful as are precious stones, we do not regard the jeweller as a 
romantic being. Even poets who sell their wares, however profitably, 
lose in dignity by the transaction. We come to think of them rather 
as tradesmen than poets. The processes of business overpower the 
romantic quality of the thing they sell. But with the men who sell 
perfume, we forget that they are merchants and think only of their 
romantic wares. The very faét that they deal in perfumes seems to 
imply that, in their case, the mere trading is secondary, and that 
the beautiful thing they trade in has become their business from a 
paramount love of it. In their case their hands do not become 
“soiled” by trade—they become perfumed. Merely by selling per- 

oN 16 


fumes they become affiliated to the mysterious, the aristocratic, the 
refined and delicate side of human life. They partake in all the 
divine and noble associations of perfume. Their business from the 
beginning has been with deities and priests, with kings and nobles, 
with great and beautiful ladies. As something mysterious clings to 
the humblest sailor because he has business with the magic and 
mystery of the sea, so it always has been, and Still is, with the mer- 
chant of perfumes. Because of its essential myStery, it is easy to see 
why the maker and purveyor of perfume should have been affil- 
iated even with necromancy and those old alchemic arts, the won- 
der of which Still clings to modern chemistry. The romance of 
geography, which not even wireless has yet destroyed, fills the busi- 
ness offices of even a New York perfumer with “murmurs and 
scents’ of far-away aromatic lands. The little aromatic packages, 
covered with strange Oriental characters, swathed with spicy wrap- 
pings, tell of long journeys from far-away sweet-smelling lands, 
and even “synthetic” perfumes bring before us laboratories, retorts 
and phials, such as the old alchemists once employed in the search 
for the elixir of life, and such as Cleopatra watched in her Still- 
room long ago in Egypt, distilling unguents to conserve her beauty. 

Whether they realized it or not, the men who first made per- 
fumes were seeking to distil something like the essence of human 
romance, something that in an aromatic dew-drop would convey 
the drama of living, the intimations of the soul, and the spiritual 
thrill of love. The Arabian doctor and chemist Avicenna (980- 
1037), among the arduous studies and picturesque adventures of 
his romantic life, set himself to this task, and, great as were his 
other achievements, he is perhaps best remembered by his distilla- 

17 ite 


tion of rose-water from the rose known as Rosa centifolia, a per- 
fume so grateful to his countrymen that when the Emperor Saladin, 
a century and a half afterwards, conquered Jerusalem, he had the 
walls and floors of Omar’s mosque washed with it. His learned 
treatises are remembered only by scholars, but his rose-water keeps 
his memory sweet to this day. 

There are many other perfumes whose very names seem to smell 
sweet by immemorial association. Merely to write the words 
“frankincense and myrrh” sweetens the page, as so many pages of 
the Bible and other old sweet-smelling books are perfumed by 
them. The very plants from which they come seem thus to have a 
romantic, and even sacred significance. Like the lover in Heine, 
frankincense comes from Yemen in Arabia, the precious tears of 
the terebinth tree, as myrrh also exudes from another little tree, 
with the learned Latin name of balsamodendron myrrha growing _ 
also in Arabia; fabled by the Greeks to be the tears of Myrrha, the 
daughter of a King of Cyprus, who was the mother of Adonis and 
was transformed into the shrub that bears her name. 

When the Magi followed the Star to the birthplace of Christ, 
myrrh was one of the birthday gifts they brought, and it is roman- 
tic to recall that Still to this day on the feast of the Epiphany, in 
commemoration of those Magian gifts, little silken bags containing 
gold and frankincense and myrrh are placed on the alms dish of 
the Chapel Royal in London by the Lord Chamberlain of the King 
of England. 

Perhaps the most ancient of historic perfumes is that “balm of 
Gilead” which was part of the merchandise of those Ishmaelite 
traders to whom Joseph was sold by his brethren. We are told that 

a 18 IK 


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«Ancient ‘Rome 


= 


they “came from Gilead with their camels, bearing spicery, and 
balm, and myrrh, going to carry it down to Egypt’; and the 
famous balm was made from the gum of the plant amyris growing 
on the mountains of Gilead, a ridge running from Mount Lebanon, 
the whole region of which was rich in fragrant shrubs. 

The spikenard of that alabaster box which Mary broke and 
poured upon the head of Christ, as he sat in the house of Simon the 
Leper in Bethany, is another perfume with a long and ancient his- 
tory, and the word, which in its original derivation meant sweet- 
smelling thing, was probably applied as a generic name for all per- 
fumes. It was made from a plant of the valerian order, found in 
the mountains of Bootan and Nepaul in India. When Alexander 
the Great invaded India, he found himself pervaded with the fra- 
grance of nard crushed out by the feet of his elephants. 

Saffron is a word which is a fragrance in itself, and to retell its 
history alone would require a whole volume. It was one of the 
plants in that “garden enclosed, my sister, my spouse” of King 
Solomon—“‘spikenard and saffron: calamus and cinnamon, with 
all trees of frankincense; myrrh and aloes, with all the chief spices.” 
It was known to the Egyptians and is frequently mentioned by 
Homer. It was strewn in Greek theatres and Roman baths, and 
when Nero entered Rome the streets were strewn with saffron. It 
was cultivated in Persia and used there and in China both in food 
and medicine, as it is Still used in Spain. It is made from a variety 
of crocus, and the crocodile was long supposed to get its name be- 
cause the only “‘true”’ tears it ever shed were those forced from it by 
the fragrance “‘where saffron groweth.”’ It was considered of such 
importance in the Middle Ages that in Nuremberg, in the r5th 

WY ITO MMe 


century, men were burnt at the stake and buried alive for the crime 
of its adulteration. 

Ambergris is another perfume with a romantic history. Its name, 
like “‘attar,” is Arabic, and originally means any perfume. Its ro- 
mantic associations, like those of civet, are in curious contrast with 
its origin, though that origin has a different romance of its own, 
that of lonely seas and sea-coasts, the seas of the Ancient Mariner 
and the buccaneer—and the whaler. Romantic enough, though it 
may seem a far call from the sperm whale to the Court of Versailles. 
Still that is but another of the surprising extremes brought together 
by the romance of perfume, part of that mystery which dignifies 
“animal secretions” by a sort of social transmutation, just as the 
mink and the silver fox are forgotten as we admire their skins about 
the shoulders of a beautiful woman. So “the biliary concretion in 
the intestines of the spermacetic whale” found floating by rough 
sailors on the seven seas, off the shores of Brazil and Madagascar, 


also on the coasts of Africa, the East Indies, China, Japan, the Mo- — 


lucca Islands, and as near home as the Bahama Islands, becomes in 
the hands of the alchemist of perfumes as rare and indispensable 
an ingredient of his magical “waters” as it is of all elaborately 
beautiful literature from the Bible to Flaubert. 

Not merely shall it make sweeter the silken rustle of the skirts 
of the dead ladies of the court of Louis XV, but the cooks in the 
royal kitchen shall use it to flavour the dishes of the weary king. 

Sandalwood has a history that goes back 500 years B.C. The 
product of an Indian tree, it is still a sacred perfume for religious 
and funeral rites among the Indian and Chinese Buddhists, and 
the trade in it in old sea-faring days was full of romantic peril. 

aX 20 Ie 


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Whaling was not more dangerous than the quest of sandalwood, 
and hundreds of sailors lost their lives in the Pacific that sandal- 
wood fans should wave in the hands of the beautiful women of 
the Regency, and that they should have inlaid boxes, exhaling its 
faint fragrance of rose, in which to hoard their love-letters. 
Lavender is another scent with a long and picturesque history. 
The lavender plant, originally a native of the high altitudes of east- 
ern Spain and northern Africa, has travelled as far north as Nor- — 
way, and has become domesticated in England in Surrey, and in 
America near Philadelphia. It was much used by the Romans in 
their baths, and its botanical name Lavandula is somewhat doubt- 
fully supposed to be derived from “‘lavare,” to wash. The abbess, 
Hildegard, in her cloister near Bingen on the Rhine, is credited 
with the invention of lavender water, and its immemorial use in 
perfuming linen has given to it an association of romantic clean- 
liness. It suggests old English homes, with their fragrant comfort, 
and Still to this day, it is sold in English streets to English house- 
wives by itinerant vendors, to the cry of “Lavender! sweet Laven- 
der!”’—a cry reminiscent of Shakespeare’s Autolycus, and his 


G LOVES as sweet as damask roses, 
Masks for faces and for noses, 

Bugle bracelet, necklace amber, 
Perfume for a lady’s chamber— 


and those strolling perfumers in old France who, in scarlet coats 

with gilt facings, used to sell “elixirs,” pills, opiates, eau de Co- 

logne, and all manner of cosmetics and quack medicines, from 

elegant chariots, to the accompaniment of a brass band, till the 
oe 


physician of Louis XVI had them banished by an unimaginative 
edict. 

Jasmine is another perfume particularly associated with ro- 
mance, its name being derived from the Persian yasmin. The Ara- 
bians introduced it into Egypt as “sambac,” and in Persian and 
Arabian poetry it is second only to the rose. There is a pretty Story 
about its introduétion into Italy. A certain Duke of Tuscany 1s 
said to have come into possession of the first jasmine plant grown 
on Italian soil, and he esteemed it so highly that he desired to keep 
it as his own secret, forbidding his gardener to give away a single 
sprig. The gardener, however, was also a lover, and on his sweet- 
heart’s birthday he made her a present of a bouquet of the forbid- 
den blossoms. These she planted, and reared others from them in 
secret so successfully that she made a fortune by their sale, and 
when she married the gardener was able to bring him a large dot 
produced by his stolen gift. 

Patchouli, which has come to have so sophisticated a sound, was 
first introduced from India, where it grows by the Ganges, in asso- 
ciation with our innocent grandmothers, whose Indian shawls 
were perfumed with it. Indian shawls being so coStly, French 
manufacturers imitated them, but while they could successfully 
imitate their fabric, they were at a loss for their peculiar odour, by 
the presence or absence of which the genuine and the spurious 
shawls were known. At length they discovered the secret, and, 
having imported patchouli plants from India, detection became 
more difficult. The odour is not for all nostrils, being of a musky 
nature. Under its Indian name of “‘puchaput,” it is used for relig- 
ious purposes in sacrificial incense Sticks and pastils; and wherever 

N22 We 


found, in Paris, London or New York, it still carries with it the 
romance of “your delicious East.” 

Rosemary is, of course, immortally associated with Ophelia: 
“There’s rosemary, that’s for remembrance,” and Shakespeare’s 
plays and all Elizabethan literature smell sweet of it. It gets its 
name from growing near the sea—‘‘ros maris” meaning “‘sea- 
dew.” It has lugubrious associations with funerals, but was once 
much used also in wedding feStivities. It was also much esteemed 
for its medicinal virtues. Its fragrance comes to us now chiefly in 
the form of scented soap. 

Bergamot is another beautiful old name, with many associations 
in literature, and, made from the juice of a small bitter orange, 
brings with it the romance of the orange groves of Messina, “by 
the blue Sicilian sea.” Snuff used to be perfumed with it. “Give 
the nose its bergamot,” wrote Cowper. It takes its name from 
Bergamo, famous for its rustic dance, the “‘bergomask”’ referred to 
in A Midsummer Night's Dream. 

Thyme, which was used as an incense in Greek temples, has a 
long past of attractive legend. When Shakespeare wrote “I know 
a bank where the wild thyme grows,” in 4 Midsummer Night's 
Dream, he was probably thinking of the Danish tradition that any 
one waiting by an elderbush on Midsummer Midnight would see 
the King of fairy-land go by with all his train of elfs and sprites. 
Thyme, too, is said to have been one of the three plants that made 
the Virgin Mary’s bed in the manger at Bethany. 

The narcissus is another flower immemorially associated with 
beauty and romance since that far-off day when the beautiful youth 
Narcissus, son of a river god and a nymph, fell in love with his 

W232 Ie 


own image in a spring, and pined away from too much loving of 
his own beauty. From his grave sprang the flower that Still smells 
sweet with the breath of his youth, the flower that Persephone was 
gathering in the meadows of Enna when Hades, the king of the 
under-world, snatched her away, “‘herself a fairer flower.” Beau- 
tiful women Still delight in its fragrance, and the spirit of that beau- 
tiful Greek youth Still exhales for them from the essences distilled 
by subtle perfumers from his memorial flower. For their purpose 
the Narcissus odorata, grown in Algeria, and the jonquil, Nar- 
cissus jonguila, grown in southern France, are found the most 
fragrant. 

The orchid was once a nymph in the train of the Goddess Diana, 
with a heart pure and cold as that of the Goddess herself. Bathing 
at twilight in a Star-lit pool in the middle of a wood, Pan espied her 
through the boughs, and loved her. But his shaggy form filled her 
with terror, and she fled for shelter to the knees of her divine mis- 
tress, who hid her from him in moonlight. The god, however, was 
determined to make her his own, and wherever she went, however 
secret the place, there was his horned head leering out at her; nor 
could the silver arrows of even Diana herself avail her nymph 
against his persistent wooing. Then the goddess, in pity for her 
plight, endowed her with one of her own divine powers, by which 
she could change her shape at will. From that moment she was 
secure against her rough wooer, for, whenever the sound of his 
pipe was heard among the hills, she would change into a flower, 
but never the same flower twice. And such magic was hers also 
that she could cause the flower to mimic some living creature, or 
inanimate object, so that thus she was hidden from her lover’s eyes. 

WY 2.4 Iie 


gid 


India 


| 
: 


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Sometimes the flower would seem a bee, sometimes a butterfly, 
sometimes a slipper fallen from her foot, sometimes her shining 
tresses; now it would mimic the claw of a dragon, now a branch 
of coral; now it would squat like a frog at the top of a swaying 
§tem, now gleam white in the shape of a swan, now rear its head 
like a snake among the bushes. Thus she played hide-and-seek with 
Pan, and escaped his caresses, while her companions mocked his 
uncouth distress with their laughter, till he himself at last grew | 
weary of the pursuit. Then the nymph, having need of her dis- 
guises no more, left them scattered like jewels up and down the 
world, hiding away in lonely woods and glimmering marshes, as 


she herself had hidden. 


G fun right use of a single jewel by a princess is one thing, but 

a vulgar display of diamonds is another. And so with per- 
fumes. Their indiscriminate and unintelligent use by vulgar over- 
dressed courtiers and dandies has been a constant theme of dram- 
atists and novelists from the beginning. We meet with many such 
“water flies” in Shakespeare, but the men with whom the early 
history of perfume is associated were far from suggesting effemi- 
nacy. To mention the names of some of them is enough. Tamer- 
lane, the Persian conqueror, Marlowe’s ‘“T'amburlaine the Great,” 
whose home was in the fierce music of trumpets and the clash of 
swords, was no less a famous amateur of perfumes. Charlemagne 
was hardly a “‘fine-puss gentleman,” but his court at Aix-la-Cha- 
pelle smelt like a rose-garden; gifts of perfume were sent to him by 
no less romantic a figure than the Caliph of “The Arabian Nights” 
—Haroun-al-Raschid. 

. HL 25 Wie 


The Crusaders, again, who will not be suspected of effeminacy, 
were largely responsible for the importation of perfume into 
Europe. As they came back from Jerusalem, they brought home to 
their ladies the sweet-smelling essences of the East, and among 
their gifts to St. Louis of France were rare attars and incenses un- 
known before to the altars and boudoirs of the West. And they 
brought perfume with them, not merely as a luxury, but as a 
“civilizer.” Table-manners in Europe were not so very delicate in 
those days, and to introduce rose-water into the finger-bowls of 
guests at great houses was not perhaps the least of the achievements 
of the Soldiers of the Cross. Some soldiers, indeed, whose courage 
was never in dispute, have loved perfume to their undoing. Such 
was the Roman General Plautus Planca, who, hiding in a cave, 
was finally tracked by the nostrils of his pursuers, because, like 
King Antiochus of Syria, he smelt in so costly a manner. A later 
warrior, the Prince de Condé, was a learned perfumer, and directed 
his chemists in the preparation of the snuff which he was wont to 
take deliberately before his father. As we think of perfumes, one 
cannot help recalling the line of John Keats’ poem, “Kings, princes, 
were they all.’’ The names of perfumes, famous and current to this 
day, are indissolubly associated with “the great’ in one way or 
another. Take Frangipani. Fragile, delicate, sophisticated as are 
its suggestions—Still, it was a Marshal of France—Marechal des 
Armées de Louis XIJ]—fellow-adventurer of Columbus, who was 
its discoverer. A learned botanist, as well as a soldier, as the armada 
of Columbus approached the coast of Antigua, the Marquis was 
Struck by a delicious off-shore perfume. It proved to be the fra- 
grance of the Plumiera Alba in flower. Since then it has been 

i 26 Ie 


‘Persia 


known by his name, as his name is now only recalled by its per- 
fume, no longer amid the sound of brass ordnance and Spanish 
musquets, but to the gentle waving of fans even more dangerous. 
Like other great men, the great Marquis Frangipani smells sweet 
and blossoms in the dust. 


HE fashion of perfume was first introduced into France, as 

we have seen, by the Crusaders, and France, the great civil- _ 
izer of Europe, has remained ever since the country of perfume, par 
excellence. From the twelfth century onwards the history of per- 
fume might almoSt be said to be the history of France. The kings 
and queens of France, and its beautiful ladies who were queens in 
all but name, have all been, with scarcely an exception, patrons and 
patronesses of perfume. Affairs of State did not obscure for Philip 
Augustus his interest in perfumery, and one of the earliest acts of 
his reign, in the year 1190, was to grant a charter to the perfumers 
of Paris. Charles V himself dire¢ted the planting in the gardens of 
the Louvre of a garden particularly designed for the distillation of 
perfumes—lavender, roses, lilies, violets, sage and hyssop. Fair 
women eagerly sought after musk and ambergris. Perfumed cos- 
metics of all kinds were in demand, and scented soaps were ped- 
dled through the Streets by itinerant “savonniers,” crying: 


“T’ai savon d’outremer, savon!”’— 


I have soap from over-seas—soap!|— 


the most fashionable soap then coming from Naples. 
Everything was made to smell sweet. Linen was perfumed with 
sachets, called “coussines,’’ lavender and violet being the most 
W 27 We 


favoured odours. In the old account-books of the chamberlains of 
the kings and princes of the House of Valois, we have such pictur- 
esque items as this: “June 1383. To Hugues Dars, chamberlain of 
Monseigneur de Valois, for roses and lavender, bought by him to 
place among the King’s linen.” This king was Charles VI, and 
there is a similar entry of the purchase of “azure” satin from which 
to make sachets for his beautiful and gallant Queen Isabeau of 
Bavaria, one of the most exquisite of the devotees of perfume. Her 
rooms, as those of other great ladies of the time, were perfumed 
with “‘Oiselettes de Chypre,” which were artificial birds made of 
silk and feathers, and stuffed with perfumed powders. 

Charles VIII (1470-1498) had his perfumer “en titre”—per- 
fumer to the King! Catherine de Medici also had hers (of whom 
more anon), while her beautiful rival in the affections of her royal 
husband, Henri II, Diana of Poitiers, is said to have had no less a 
personage for her beauty doctor than the famous alchemist Para- 
celsus—though one of her recipes was no more mysterious than 
the washing of her face on the coldest mornings in “well-water.”” 
Catherine’s infamous son Henri III, who made up like a woman, 
is said to have employed perfumes and cosmetics dating as far back 
as the boudoir of Poppaea, the wife of Nero. Catherine’s official 
perfumer—and poisoner—was the famous René the Florentine, 
whose shop on the Pont au Change will be familiar to readers of 
Dumas. Nowadays the diabolic skill of René is regarded as fabu- 
lous, but in his own time he was credited with the invention of 
perfumed gloves so subtly poisoned that the wearer drew in death 
through the pores of the skin. A pleasant gift of such gloves by 
Catherine to Jeanne d’ Albert, mother of Henri IV, is said to have 

on} 28 We 


resulted in the demise of that great lady. But modern science de- 
nies the possibility of such romantic poisoning. 

Gloves more innocently perfumed played a great part in the 
history of perfume, and it is intereSting to note that the sale of per- 
fumes was a branch of the glove business for upwards of two cen- 
turies, and remained inseparable from it till the reign of Louis XIV, 
who granted a charter to the guild of “gantiers-parfumeurs” in 
1656. Anne of Austria, the queen of the beautiful hands, of whom — 
it was said that with fair linen and perfumes one could entice her 
to Hades, was a great lover of perfumed gloves. She sent to Naples 
for them, though she is credited with saying that for a glove to be 
perfect, its leather must be prepared in Spain, cut in France, and 
finished in England. Gloves made of mouse-skin were fashionable 
at her court. 

Queen Elizabeth of England, in whose reign, owing to the 
travels of her “Italianate” courtiers, perfumes first became fash- 
ionable in London, also took great pleasure in a pair of perfumed 
gloves brought to her with “‘other pleasant things,” from Italy by 
her favourite, the Earl of Oxford, who himself, soldier as he was, 
wore a jerkin of perfumed leather. Queen Elizabeth had her own 
ill-room—as also had her court ladies—where she diverted her- 
self with composing her own perfumes. One of her compositions 
has come down to us—a pomatum made from apples, mixed with 
the fat of a young dog! Her royal linens were kept in “sweet cof- 
fers” —chests of fragrant wood; and she particularly prided herself 
in a cloak of perfumed Spanish leather—that “peau d’Espagne”’ 
which is Still esteemed in our own day. 

Perfumed bellows were used by Cardinal Richelieu to make 

oH 29 Ne 


sweet his apartments, and the Elizabethan playwright John Ford 
thus alludes to them: 


i’LL breathe as gently 
As a perfumed pair of sucking bellows 


In some sweet lady’s chamber. 


The perfuming of rooms and even public places was a pleasant. 
feature of the past. In Catherine de Medici’s day, the fountains of 
Paris, on festal occasions, used to play perfumes, and there is on 
record an old bill of six golden crowns paid by the City of Paris, 
in the year 1548, to the perfumer Georges Marteau, “for aromatic 
herbs and plants, to perfume the waters of public fountains during 
the late rejoicings.” 


G Foe medicinal and sanitary use of perfume has been recog- 
nized from the earliest times. The Greek physician Hippoc- 
rates prescribed perfumes for his patients, particularly for those 
suffering from nervous disorders, and recipes for certain potent 


essences were inscribed on marble tablets in the temple of Aescu- 
lapius. 


fe HE best recipe for health 


Is to apply sweet scents unto the brain 


says an old poet, and musk is still a universal specific in China, and 

regarded as curative of most bodily ills from headaches to serpent- 

bites. Distillations from the rose were regarded as especially effi- 

cacious among the Greeks, and there is a legend of a poor but beau- 

tiful girl Milto whose pious offerings of flowers to Venus had so 
oH 30 Ihe 


won the divine favour that, when her beauty was threatened by an 
unsightly tumor, the goddess appeared to her in a dream prescrib- 
ing the application of roses from her altar, whereby the loveliness 
was immediately restored. According to Anacreon— 


PEE rose dithlea healing balm 
The beating pulse of pain to calm. 


ss OOKS on perfume began to appear early in the 16th century. 


One of the earliest of these was “‘les secrets de Maistre Alexys 
le Piedmontois,” which contained this recipe for a magical water, 
warranted to make ladies beautiful for ever: ““Take a young raven 
from the nest, feed it on hard eggs for forty days, kill it, and distill 
it with myrtle leaves, talc, and almond oil.” 

Another of these was published in Paris in 1530, by one Jean 
Bodin, and had for its charming title: ““The Decoration of Human 
Nature and the adornment of Ladies.” Bodin was a precursor of 
the great French perfumers of the 17th century, which may be 
called the great age of perfume. A veritable “fury of perfume,” 
according to a French writer, seems to have possessed all classes. 
Sumptuary laws were passed against its use by peasants and other 
“common” folk, and even the sacred precinéts of nunneries were 
invaded by it, some of the gayer sisters carrying their worldliness 
so far as to paint and powder, and wear patches. To “make up” an 
“élégante,” wrote a satirist of the time, “an entire perfumer’s shop 
scarcely suffices.”” Perfumers made large fortunes, and left names 
to posterity. 

The book which is the great French classic of perfume is Le 

ON 3 Ihe 


Parfumeur Francois, published in 1693, by Simon Barbe, who 
sold perfumes, in the rue des Gravilliers, “A la Totson D’or’— 
At the Sign of the Golden Fleece. The reader will probably like 
to see Barbe’s full title in all its quaintness: “Le Parfumeur 
Francois, qui enseigne toutes les maniéres de turer les odeurs des 
fleurs, et & faire toutes sortes de composition de parfums, avec les 
secrets de purifier le tabac en poudre, et le parfumer de toutes 
sortes d’odeurs, Pour le divertissement de la noblesse, l'utilité des 
personnes religteuses, necessaire aux baigneurs et aux perru- 
guiers.” * : 

In his preface Barbe further adds that, beyond these uses of 
his book, he considers that he will contribute to the glory of God 
through the perfumes that the clergy (“Jes personnes religieuses’’) 
compose for their churches. | 

This book was very successful, and Barbe followed it by another, 
Le Parfumeur Royal; but, in the interval, the vogue of perfume 
had undergone a serious eclipse, for Louis, who, up till then, had 
been known as “‘the sweet-smelling monarch,” had suddenly de- 
cided that the headaches from which he suffered were due to his 
over-indulgence in perfumes. Henceforth perfume was banished 
from the Court, except that of orange-blossom, and the diarist Saint 
Simon says that “if you had to approach anywhere near the King 
you did well not to wear any.” A visitor from Sicily in Paris writes 
that ‘one can enjoy all the pleasures of the senses in Paris, except 
perfume. As the King no longer loves it, all the world is under the 


* The French Perfumer, which teaches all the methods of extracting the 
scents of flowers, and of preparing all kinds of perfumes, with the secret of 
purifying tobacco, and perfuming it with any kind of scent. For the enter- 
tainment of the nobility, the use of religious persons, and indispensable to 
bath-house keepers, and hair-dressers. 


Wi 32 Me 


necessity of hating it too, and the court ladies pretend to faint away 
at the sight of a flower.” 

With the accession of Louis XV, however, perfume came into 
its own again. The reign of that Strangely weary king had polit- 
ically much to answer for, but, if its thoughtless luxury did un- 
doubtedly hasten the “‘deluge”’ of the French Revolution which 
Louis himself foresaw, it is but just to acknowledge that, under 
the influence of that great arbitress of elegance, Madame de Pom- 
padour, it set Standards of taste and Style in all the arts, and partic- 
ularly in what that old French perfumer called “‘the decoration of 
human nature,” for which we Still owe it gratitude. The Story of 
Versailles, indeed, is one long fairy-tale of elegance, and so large a 
part did the increasingly refined and learned use of perfume play 
in its enchanted life of fashion, that the court of Louis XV became 
known as “la cour parfumée.”’ Etiquette prescribed the use of a 
different kind of perfume each day, and the expenditure for per- 
fumes in Madame de Pompadour’s own household at Choisy alone 
amounted in one year to no less than 500,000 livres (something 
like $100,000). The recipe for the perfumed cosmetic said to have 
been most efficient in maintaining the beauty of Madame de Pom- 
padour is still in the possession of a well-known French perfumer, 
handed down to his firm by the heirs of Manon Foissy, chamber- 
maid to the Marchioness. 

Madame Du Barry’s recipe for youth was a perfumed lotion 
compounded for her by no less a “magician” than Cagliostro. She 
had her own ‘“‘Still-room woman,” too, who distilled fragrant 
waters for her boudoir, and her expenditure on perfumes was per- 


haps only surpassed by the charm it enhanced. 
W 33 Ie 


The famous ‘‘Poudre a la Marechale’’ takes its name from a 
noble lady who used to amuse herself in this way, Madame la 
Marechale d’Aumont. In this connection one must not forget an- 
other noble lady of an earlier day, Queen Elizabeth of Hungary, 
who in 1370 distilled that “Hungary water” Still in use after five 
and a half centuries. The recipe is said to have been given to her 
by a hermit, and proved so preservative of her beauty that, at the 
age of seventy-two, she was asked in marriage by the King of 
Poland. This elixir, according to a formula as late as 1920, is com- 
pounded, among other ingredients, of rosemary, verbena, pep- 
permint oil, triple rose-water and triple orange-flower, with the 
addition of ninety per cent of alcohol, and six months allowed for 
its maturity. 


G foe elaborate wigs of the time necessitated an immense out- 
lay on perfumed powder. Philanthropists bewailed the fact 
that the flour thus employed would have fed ten thousand “unfor- 
tunates,”’ and that far more powder went on to aristocratic heads 
than into aristocratic Stomachs. Everyone powdered, men, women 
and children, and perfumed rouge too was the fashion with all 
classes, a fashion with which we, in our present renaissance of the 
elegancies, with our lipsticks and beauty bags, should not find it 
difficult to sympathize. Then, as now, there were so-called “mor- 
alists” who frowned on the very human and civilized desire to be as — 
comely and dainty as possible, as though bad complexions were a 
sign of virtue. All women looked the same age, they complained— 
and why not? Occasionally a great lady occurred who refused to 


paint and powder, and there is an amusing Story told of Marie 
N34 


22 ARMME sete 


Elizabethan England 


Therese, who was one of these social heretics. In 1745 she arrived 
in Paris from Spain to marry the Dauphin, and it was at once per- 
ceived “with terror” by the court that she used neither powder nor 
rouge. It had been explained to her on the voyage that at the 
French court her own natural pink and white complexion would 
seem far too pale, and that she would simply have to paint a very 
little. She remained obdurate, however, conceding at last that she 
would so adorn herself only at the express order of the king, the _ 
queen, and the dauphin. So important was the crisis that an ex- 
press was sent post-haste to Versailles, where a council was called, 
and that pink of dandies, the Duc de Richelieu, despatched to her 
with the weighty decision that paint and powder she must. Then 
only did she resign herself to the charming inevitable. 

Even the guillotine of the French Revolution could only cut off 
those powdered heads. Madame de Monaco put on rouge before 
mounting the cart that was to take her to the scaffold. “Perhaps, 
she feared,” they said, “that she would grow pale in the presence of 
death.” Robespierre himself was always freshly powdered, and 
exceedingly particular about his powdered wigs, nor did Napoleon 
discard powder till after the campaign in Italy. 

Fashionable ladies under the Directoire revived the La aa 
baths of the Greeks and Romans, and Madame Tallien, on leav- 
ing her bath of Strawberries and raspberries, used to have herself 
gently rubbed with sponges soaked in milk and perfumes. 

Napoleon’s taste in perfume was simple, being confined to a 
lavish use of Eau de Cologne, but his Empress Josephine had the 
more luxurious tastes of her Creole blood, and she had her per- 
fumes sent to her from Martinique. The consumption of perfume 


vi 35 Ate 


was never greater than it was during her reign, and a world 
reeking with the smoke of her husband’s cannon may well have 
thanked her for it. Her boudoir at Malmaison was so saturated 
with musk that, sixty years after her death, it was Still redolent 
of it, and its then owner found it impossible to rid himself of its 
ghostly presence. Ungallant man he must have been to wish to lay 
so charming a ghost. To be haunted by the perfume of a beautiful 
dead empress . . . the whole of the romantic power of perfume 
is there. 

Coincident with what one might call “the AuguStan age” of 
perfume in France, England too went elaborately perfumed, pow- 
dered and patched; but, as in all such matters of fashion, she fol- 
lowed France then as now. In Dr. Johnson’s day, however, she 
had one famous perfumer whose name has been handed down to 
us in the pages of “The Tatler,” Charles Lilly, in the Strand, who, 
we read, had great skill in preparing “‘snuffs and perfumes, which 
refresh the brain in those that have too little to know the want 
Orit: 

Over a century later England was to produce, or to acclimatize, 
one really illustrious perfumer, Eugene Rimmel, who, in addition 
to giving his name to many well-known perfumes, wrote a charm- 
ing and learned book on the history of his art, “The Book of Per- 
fumes,” to which the present writer hereby acknowledges his 
grateful obligation. 


Cy is impossible to refleét on the mysterious nature of perfume, 
y. without realizing how well-founded has been the respect paid 


to perfumers throughout history, for the perfumer must combine 
HG Ie 
3 


in himself so many various gifts. He must be at once a man of 
science, and an artist, and be as well something of a psychologist 
and a poet.* The strange power of perfume over the mind and 
the senses, its action on the memory and the imagination, the 
manner in which it creates pictures, recalls far-away events, and 
induces certain spiritual and emotional States, are so analogous to 
the effects produced by sound and colour that, though the connec- 
tion is Still scientifically unproven, it seems impossible to doubt — 
that there is some deep connection between the three, and that all 
are modes of one central spiritual apprehension. The famous per- 
fumer Piesse was so impressed by the correspondence between 
perfume and music that he endeavoured to “arrange the different 
odours in a ‘harmonic scale’ having the compass of the piano, and 
to deduce therefrom a law for the mixture of the several aromatic 
substances.” He dreamed of combining the several scents like 
tones to produce chords in different scales; the chords of odours to 
agree with those of tones. 

That Piesse was on the right track there seems every reason to 
believe, and modern perfume-artists are able, at least, so skilfully to 
combine various scents as to produce definite effects, and, so to say, 
to transmit through the olfactory nerves precise messages to the 
mind, such as the old Arabian lover would do by sending a letter to 
his lady in the form of a bouquet composed of certain significant 
flowers. In this respect it is not merely fanciful to compare the art 
of the perfumer with the art of the poet. The poet makes use of 
words to create certain pictures, or to stir certain emotions, and the 


* There is a curious chapter on the psychology of perfume in that Strange 
romance, “A Rebours” by J. K. Huysmans, which the reader may care to 
read for himself: 


ony 37 Ko 


perfumer does precisely the same thing with scents, among which 
he is able to discriminate with a learned sensitiveness no less deli- 
cate, and perhaps even more remarkable, than the poet’s sensitive- 
ness to those innumerable fine shades of words imperceptible to 
others. There is, I understand, a perfumer in New York who can 
thus differentiate unerringly between two hundred varieties of 
odours. The modern perfumer has also developed to a high degree 
the psychological side of his art. The relationship between perfume 
and personality is an especial object of his Study. As we are all 
born with a susceptibility for particular colours, and an indiffer- 
ence to or even dislike of others, a faét of deep unexplained mean- 
ing, and reflecting in some mysterious way the secrecies of our 
characters, so is it with odours. Every one has one or more odours 
to which his innermost self instantly answers, and it is the art of 
the modern psychologist-perfumer, an art which links him with 
his old “‘necromantic” brethren of the past, so subtly to Study the 
personalities of those more exquisite amateurs of perfume who 
seek his magic elixirs as to create for them the perfume that will 
exactly correspond to their psychical selves. 


~~ 
4 


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a\ fA f 


aN f° HILE its immemorial perfumes Still come to us from the 
0 © Eas, the modern Paradise of Perfume is to be found in 
Southern France. Bulgaria has a special distinction for the fine 
quality of the attar of roses distilled from its rose-gardens; and 
England, in its villages of Mitcham and Hitchin, still retains its 
historic pre-eminence for lavender, as also for peppermint. But 
Southern France, par excellence, is the modern Mecca of perfume. 
Cannes is famous for its rose, acacia, jasmine and eroli oil; Nimes 


arr) AA. 
ba 38 Kyo 


for its thyme, rosemary and lavender; and Nice for its violets. Yet, 
as Sheffield is famous for its steel, and Pittsburg for coal and iron, 
the little town of Grasse has a more gracious fame. It might be 
called the very heart of all the sweetness of the modern world, and 
in a world where men must work at something, it is impossible to 
imagine a town in which the inhabitants are more happily em- 
ployed. Its entire business is with flowers, that “concentrated youth 
of flowers,” which someone has defined as perfume. It is a lit-. 
tle dream-world, which for generations has had but one occu- 
pation, the perpetuation of the souls of flowers in exquisite dis- 
tillations, so that their spiritual messages of eternal youth and 
romance, of beauty and dream, may be transmitted in little crys- 
tal phials to great cities far from the dawn and the dew, touch the 
prose of life with delicate fingers, and give to its poetry a subtler 
expressiveness. On the credit side of Catherine de Medici’s dark 
account we have to write the beautiful institution of Grasse, for it 
was she who sent there a certain Sieur Toubarelli to found its first 
laboratory of perfume. It was an involuntary good deed which, 
in its creation of generations of happy people, should be counted 
in her favour against St. Bartholomew. Against the sorrow she 
brought to Paris the joy she brought to Grasse should surely weigh. 
To her is due that all the inhabitants of Grasse today are joyous 
dreamers, from the peasants who gather the flowers in the fields at 
early morning to the learned artists of perfume who make from 
them their ethereal concentrations. 

Shakespeare’s phrase of “the art which nature makes’’ has never 
had a more Striking illustration than Grasse, for the beautiful in- 
dustry by which itis famous is no mere accident. It is the inevitable 


a 39 


creative expression of unique geographical and climatic conditions 
which have made the Riviera from Mentone to Hyéres a guarded 
and luxurious coastline, with the Maritime Alps, their snow-clad 
peaks and violet gorges, for its Stupendous screen against the north- 
ern winds, and the Mediterranean, with its soft sea airs and its en- 
chanted colours, iridescent and volatile as the hues of the dying 
dolphin, that sea from which all the dreams of the world, Aphro- 
dite-like, have sprung, for its wave-borne energy of eternal Spring. 
A coast so guarded and so nurtured was necessarily a soil in which 
only beauty could grow. To be the Garden of the World was its 
destiny. It could be nothing else. And throughout all history that 
has been its lovely meaning. Flowers flood it with colour and per- 
fume from east to west. Only flowers can grow there. They are as 
native and spontaneous to the soil as weeds to other lands. In what 
other land shall one gather roses in December, or crush wild laven- 
der under one’s feet, carelessly blooming like heather across the 
hills? There flowering myrtle and calla lilies are as common as 
daisies in English meadows, and through a Winter which would 
seem like Spring elsewhere iris and English wall-flowers are in 
perpetual blossom. 

In such a land, man’s fortunate business is beauty. Whereas in 
other countries men, scarcely human, toil in the blaze of furnaces, 
or in the eternal night of mines, or, reeking with blood, make a 
horrible livelihood by the slaughter of animals, in that earthly 
Paradise of which Grasse is the centre, men make an art of nature, 
and grow flowers, or plant orange-trees, or terrace the hills with | 
olives, or trellis them with grapes, or distil perfumes. In short, as 
Browning wrote, they do what some men dream of all their lives. 


MW 49 iyo 


Fortunate land, fortunate people! They live and move and have 
their being in a Paradise of Flowers. 


TATISTICS have sometimes an imaginative value. Here are 

a few, which I have on good authority, and will witness that 
what I have been saying is no mere “poet’s dream”’: Grasse con- 
tains upwards of 50 distilleries of perfumes, and its exportation of 
perfumes and essences brings it a yearly revenue of many millions 
of francs. 60,000 acres are given up to the cultivation of flowers, 
and these acres produce a yearly average of 2,640,000 pounds of 
roses and 3,300,000 pounds of orange-flowers, 2,200,000 pounds 
of jasmin, 220,000 pounds of tuberose. 25,000 pounds of roses 
are needed to produce one litre of essence, which is sold for from 
2,000 to 2,500 francs. Of course, these Statistics are relative and 
vary from year to year, but they will give some idea of the business 
reality of the dream-industry of Grasse. 

Every month in Grasse, however wintry, has its flowers. Here 
is its calendar. 

From January to March: violets, narcissus, jonquil, mimosa. 
During April, May and June: the rose, particularly the rose centi- 
folia, little known in the great florists’ shops on the Rue de la Paix 
but with a delicate perfume all its own. This, too, is the season of 
orange blossoms. The abundance of orange flowers carried daily 
to the perfume factories makes one delirious to think of —30,000 
kilos (nearly 70,000 pounds) a day for each of the fifty “usines”’ 
of Grasse! 

June brings mignonette, pinks and golden broom. 

July and August bring lavender, jasmin and tuberose. Particu- 

War i 


larly in the evening, Grasse is aware of the infinitely delicate per- 
fume of the jasmin, which only gives its heart to the twilight, fill- 
ing all its Streets with its breath like the swinging of a censer. 

August, September and Oétober are sweet with mint and gera- 
nium and aspic. And from September to December, the great yel- 
low cups of the cassia open and brim over. 

As the seasons come along for these various floral crops, it is easy 
to imagine the feverish activity in Grasse, both among the terraced 
plantations where the reapers begin their beautiful labour at dawn, 
only to end it at sunset, and at the various perfumeries wide open 
to receive the fragrant harvest. All day long, from plantations 
doubly gay with the beautiful laughing girls and handsome youths 
of Provence, to the perfumeries where more beautiful girls and 
laughing youths await them, great wagons piled high with flowers 
pass to and fro in a continuous stream. It is a swift Stream, for there 
is no time to waste, as flowers are proverbially short-lived, and the 
perfumer must catch their volatile breath before they fade. Arrived 
at the usine, the piled up sacks are emptied on the spacious floor 
of a great hall surrounded by high copper retorts, making vast 
mounds of indescribable colour and fragrance, and these, having 
been weighed, are carried off in overflowing baskets to the various 
ateliers where the chemists wait to extract their souls. One can 
easily realize how active those ateliers must be when one is told 
that in twenty-four hours 50,000 kilos (about 110,000 pounds) 
of roses, as well as many thousand kilos of orange-flowers, must be 
disposed of. When one realizes that there are some fifty such 
“usines” in Grasse—think how sweet the old city must smell for 
weeks with the passage all day long of these Paradisal cargoes. 


ony 42 Rio 


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Indeed, the whole country for miles around is like a sea of fra- 
grance. It is hard to imagine a more exquisite experience than to 
approach the city under the starlight during one of these floral 
harvestings. A mystic might well believe that he was approaching 
the gates of Heaven. 


cA the modern world the art and use of perfume have reached 


a degree of expressiveness and refinement far surpassing that . 
of former times, less lavish, but more individual and more exqui- 
site. The whole realm of feminine aesthetics—that is, the art of 
the beauty of woman—has been freed from the bondage of the 
narrow, unintelligent, moralist. Woman is no longer lectured for 
taking a proper pride in her own charms and employing artistic 
means or dramatizing them by displaying them to the best advan- 
tage, even supplementing them, if needs be. 

Nature unadorned, lovely as she may be, seldom makes the 
most of herself, and her handmaiden art can teach her many things 
that do not necessarily artificialize her, but, on the contrary, de- 
velop and accent her naturalness. The lily of the field may not 
need painting, but the human lily is usually improved by sweet- 
smelling powder and a touch of rouge. As man’s first duty to 
woman is his Strength, so woman’s first duty to man is her beauty. 
It remains, as of old, his inspiration and his reward. It is also her 
first duty to herself, for self-expression is the law of all healthy 
organisms. The meaning of woman is—beauty, and all that beauty 
implies, all that emanates from it: delicacy, elegance, romance, and 
the atmosphere that exhales from these attributes. The achieve- 
ment of this need not detraét from a woman’s work-a-day quali- 


nl 43 Me 


ties, her goodness, her helpfulness, or her intelligence. On the 
contrary, these qualities all gain by association with charm; and 
it is curious to observe that the present widespread renaissance of 
feminine aesthetics has come side by side with her vigorous entry 
‘nto that hard work of the world which had previously been re- 
garded as the exclusive province of man. The old idea that the cul- 
tivation of a woman’s brain meant a neglect of her beauty has been 
exploded, as the most cursory glance into a modern office, or even 
factory, is enough to prove. In entering man’s world, woman, far 
from abandoning her own, has emphasized it, and whether she is 
a lawyer, doctor, or Stenographer, she is very evidently more a 
woman than ever. I do not think it is a masculine illusion, but it 
seems to me that the world can never have been so full of beautiful 
women, and the reason is that never before has woman, en masse, 
willed so whole-heartedly to be beautiful. This, I believe, has largely 
come about by the campaign of education waged by all those vari- 
ous artists whose concern is with woman’s beauty, the modiste- 
creators of fashions in woman’s dress, beauty-specialists and so 
forth, among whom not the least important have been the per- 
fumers. Woman has been encouraged to Study herself with a view 
of giving the highest expressiveness to her own individuality. For 
generations she has been a mere amateur of herself; Now she has 
become an artist—not to make of herself something that she is not, 
but to bring out what she is, to show herself in her completely ex- 
pressed naturalness, as nature meant her to be, but sometimes 
failed in achieving. When nature has not done her part, who shall 
blame a woman for striving to make up the deficiency? And by 
means of feminine aesthetics, a woman less endowed with natural 


WM 44 ie 


beauty than some others can contrive to give an impression of 
beauty to “the eye of the beholder” which is surely a gain all 
round. 

Of all the means towards this higher expressiveness of woman 
none is more delicate or more innocent than perfume. By its means 
the very soul of a woman, her spiritual atmosphere, can be dif- 
fused around her in unmistakable emanations of fragrance. As 
surely as a rose tells us of its presence before our eyes have seen it, 
so it is with a woman who knows the art of perfume, whose very 
clothes thus become herself; whose dropped handkerchief is as 
much a love-letter of her writing as though she had signed it. 
Through perfume her very thoughts are told without the clumsy 
medium of words. She becomes a veritable translation of herself 
into sweet odours. Her perfume is her spiritual presence, the wo- 
man herself as she would have us know her to be. And the more 
of an artis in perfume she becomes, she will be able to express 
her “infinite variety” by its means, her various moods and subtle 
changes from day to day, from hour to hour. There will always be 
one perfume which is her inner, unchanging self ; but she will 
know, too, how to seleét other perfumes which will express the 
variable play, the lights and shades, the nuances, of her being. 
And for all these the perfumer has the answering magic essences, 
distilled from a thousand flowers, and sensitively combined by his 
learned skill. There is no shade too fine for him to express, no 
nature, no mood, for which he has not the symbolic fragrance. 
And there is one subsidiary branch of his art which has of late 
been brought to an enchanting perfection. I refer to the exquisite 
vessels, the fairy-like crystal bottles, the tiny phials of iridescent 


A] 4, 
a 45 Ke 


glass, the quaint porcelain jars, the silken sachets, the dainty enam- 
elled boxes, the carved and inlaid fancies, and all the dream-like 
bijouterie, in themselves “‘a joy forever,” in which he hoards his 
enchanted dews, his air-soft powders, and caressing pomades. 
There are in existence beautiful scent-bottles from the tombs of 
dead beauties in Egypt, 6,000 years old. Always has the art of the 
perfumer thus been associated with all the other arts of elegance 
and high civilization, but never more than today, and never was 
its civilizing influence more needed than in this present hour; for 
the world is still uncivilized, and a new barbarism of gasoline is 
upon us. It is still a world of bad smells, and we Still need our 
casolettes, our casting-bottles, and our pomanders. Poets, painters 
and musicians are doing their best for us, but none are doing a 
better work for civilization than our artist-perfumers, with their 
concord of sweet odours. With the aid of beautiful women they 
are doing much, and even our public buildings and Streets already 
smell the sweeter for their joint conspiracy of perfume. And per- 
fume means not only elegance and refinement, it also means 
gladness. That old slave was not so far wrong when he told the 
king that he must be a happy man because he smelt so expensively. 
Nothing so swiftly creates an atmosphere of happiness as fragrance. 
The mind insensibly forgets its cares, and the soul dreams— 


As when a box of essences 
Is broken on the air. 


M46 Ne 


PAPER. THE ILLUSTRATIONS ARE REPRODUCED BY ° 
SONIAN PROCESS. DONE AT THE PRINTING HOUSE OF ¥ 
EDWIN RUDGE JANUARY 1928. 
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* O trade in perfume is to belong to romance.’ 

ee even in modern times there lingers much of the 
glamor and enchantment which have always clothed this 
business of distilling the essence of rare flowers into fra- 
grance of magic charm. 

One goes into a perfumer’s shop and feels instantly that 
one has slipped into an atmosphere of age-old mysteries and 
delights. Even in some great, busy department store the 
corner set apart for perfumes carries with it this sense of 
romance and expectancy. 

Yesterday, skilled practitioners in the art of blending 
brought their wares to the court of kings and emperors. Or 
set up a nearby shop where the ladies of the court and gay 
elegants might come to select those odeurs which struck their 


fancy. 


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Today,he sets up his shop nearby where Fashion holds her 
court and where the ladies of the court—and who indeed is 
not in attendance —may come to select those odeurs which 
strike their fancy. . . . 


ri T isin Paris, today, that Fashion holds her chief court and 
where all the beautiful things of the world are brought to 
lay before her throne. | 

In the famous Rue de la Paix, especially, one may walk a 
few short squares and see the names of great couturiers— 
arbiters of fashion in frocks and gowns and wraps—whose 
influence penetrates even the remotest little towns of the 
United States. Jewelers whose clients are royal princesses, 
wives of great international bankers or the reigning favorite 
of the Paris stage. . . . 

And it is here, at No. 20, that the salon of Richard 
Hudnut, in royal manner, has opened its doors. A shop so 
exquisite in its appointments, so complete an expression of 


all the romance, the allure, the mystery of the perfumer’s art 


that Paris applauds in delighted astonishment. 

For here is a room glowing with a rosy shell-like beauty. 
As you enter a soft, diffused light seems to fill the place. A 
subtle, drifting fragrance greets the senses. Pastels and silver 
and crystal serve to achieve an effect of almost fairy-like 


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loveliness. Mirrored walls send back and forth myriads of 
soft, bright reflections. Murals from the hand of the famous 
French lacquerist, Jean Dunand, arrest one by their unusual 
color and delicate rhythmic quality. 

High overhead arches a pale pink ceiling. Birds and 
flowers in silver bas-relief form an exquisite design over its 
surface, to be repeated and elaborated in the wall panels. 

Under the arches are grey-green marble pilasters. They 
were imported from Sweden, but they look as though they 
might have risen from some mysterious palace at the bottom 
of the sea. | | 

Opaque glass has been fashioned into a central chandelier 
and side-lights of rarely beautiful design. 

From Aubusson came the rug of pale rose, with its flow- 
ered border in varied pastel tints. Modern design dictated 
the beautiful furniture with its upholstery of pink and silver 
brocade. 

In the sheer beauty of its conception, in the exquisite per- 
fection of every detail, in the ethereal atmosphere that has 
been caught between these four walls, this shop represents, 
vraiment, a triumph of modern art. 

And here, also, in rows and rows of delicate vitrines is a 
wealth of captivating articles de toilette awaiting my lady's 
choice. Powder, rouge, toilet waters, lip sticks—and above 
all, perfume. Perfume of infinite variety, compounded of 


* ‘ —_— 
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the rare essences found in that beautiful] region around the 
Mediterranean where so much of all that i is exquisite in 
perfume has its origin. 


i T was altogether fitting that the feature of the Richard 
Hudnut Paris opening should have been the introduction of 
Parfum le Début. 

To even those versed deeply in the subtleties of perfume 
the new Parfum le Début came as a revelation. And within 
a brief time, all over Paris, it had become par excellence the 
vogue. | 

For here is a new creation in fragrance. Four delicate and 
illusive odeurs—a blending of rare essences as subtle and 
imaginative as any of the great masterpieces of the per- 
fumer’s art—styled to meet the demands of today. 

Always, of course, masters of the art have tried to inter- 
pret in their perfumes, the personality of their client. But 
here is an interpretation of the four loveliest of feminine 
moods. 

For in the expression of one’s loveliest moods is the secret 
of one’s charm—a knowledge that lies deep in the heart of 
every woman. 

Four odeurs, each caught in an enchanted petit no of 


a color symbolic of its mood particuliére! 


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Le Debut Vert 


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Le D&tpur: VERT 


Le Début Vert, in green flacon, for the mood of Adven- 
ture. . . . An odeur, fresh, inspiriting. Suggestive of 
worlds glamorous with delight. Of life vibrant with gay 
daring and the freedom of youth. 


LE DEBUT BLANC 


Le Début Blanc, in crystal flacon, for the mood of Gaiety. 
. For those precious, light-hearted moments—those 
fleeting hours of sheer joy when dancing laughter holds 


sway. 
Le DEBUT BLEU 


Le Début Bleu, in blue flacon, for Romance, loveliest of 
all moods. . . . An enchanting odeur that whispers of a 
soft, caressing magic. The fragrance of a dream world when 
life slips its tether with a quickened sense of ecstasy. 


LE DEBUT NOIR 


And le Début Noir, in black flacon, for the mood of So- 
phistication. . . . For those hours when one becomes, in- 
deed, Ja belle femme sophisticate. An odeur subtle, provo- 
cative, challenging, yet by its very delicacy disarming. 
Parfum le Début is—always—a parfum de Paris. A per- 


fume created, sealed and packaged in the Richard Hudnut 
laboratoire at Surésnes. . . . It may be had here at any of 
the better shops. 

And since one mood slips into another you will find pleas- 
ure not alone in one but in all four of these captivating odeurs 
le Début. So sometimes in your favorite shop lift the stop- 
pers one after another and let each fragrance whisper to you 


of its secret and of its promise. . . . 


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